Jasper Fforde has a new book out, Shades of Grey, which isn’t tied in with either of his previous series (Thursday Next or Nursery Crime). While I hope to review this book in the next few weeks, I thought I’d take a look back at his previous books:

The Thursday Next series consists of 5 books: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rottenand First Among Sequels. The books follow the continuing adventures of Thursday Next, an English woman who works for as a literary detective. The job of a literary detective is varied and interesting. Thursday is called upon to enter books, rescue people, keep literary characters in their place (they occasionally wander off to other books or try to change their actions from what was originally in the plot) among other tasks. Thursday is aided by her boyfriend/fiance/husband Landon (who gets deleted from the timeline at one point), her father who is a renegade Chrono Corps (protects the timeline) agent, her aunt and uncle Polly and Mycroft Next and her pet dodo Pickwick.

The books are very heavy into literature jokes (Charles Dickens and Charolotte Bronte are frequent targets) and fantastic interactions between literary characters. Time travel (and time travel paradoxes) play a big part in the series as well.  Thursday gains the ability to enter novels and help mediate conflicts and spends a vacation in an unpublished book Caversham Heights(which ties into the Nursery Crime books). The first four books makeup one storyline and First Among Sequels starts a new series (with a new book expected in 2011).

Overall the books are wonderfully funny, with characters from all over interacting in different scenarios. Fforde handles it all with ease. Having said that, the earlier books are much better than the later ones. I was slightly disappointed by First Among Sequels, but not enough to resist reading the new books when they come out.

The Nursery Crime books (The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear) follow the adventures of Detective Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crimes Division. In the The Big Over Easy, Jack gets a new partner (Mary Mary) and investigates the death of Humpty Dumpty. In The Fourth Bear, Jack and Mary investigate a missing Goldilocks, a porridge smuggling scheme and the elusive Fourth Bear who might link both of them. Caversham Heights, the fictional, unpublished novel from the Thursday Next universe and the plot is extremely similar to The Big Over Easy.

What the Thursday Next books do for literature, the Nursery Crime books do for nursery rhymes. All of the characters are all treated as real and the crimes committed are investigated as a detective novel. They are written as straight detective novels with the humor comes from the scenes and character interactions more than slapstick or funny lines.

The new book, Shades of Grey, looks to follow Fforde’s satirical bent into a new direction. The blurbs make it sound closer to the Thursday Next series only more of a technology direction instead of literature.

This post is part of the thread: Thursday Next – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.